U.S. Senate Majority leader John Thune (R-SD), speaks during a press conference following the weekly Senate caucus luncheons, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., April 29, 2025.
Two Democratic senators on Monday tore into their Republican counterparts for "sneaking" a provision into their party's massive budget legislation that they said would provide a "multibillion dollar bailout" for the American pharmaceutical industry.
In a letter sent to U.S. President Donald Trump, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) pointed out that the budget package "includes provisions that block or delay the Trump administration from using Medicare drug price negotiation to lower the price of certain blockbuster drugs" including "the top-selling cancer drugs in the world, such as Keytruda, Opdivo, Darzalex, and more."
The senators explained that Keytruda was originally due to become subject to Medicare price negotiations starting next year, but that has now been put on ice by the GOP's legislation.
"We see no policy rationale whatsoever for delaying the... ability to negotiate lower prices on these drugs other than handing money over to the industry," they charged. "Because of you and congressional Republicans, seniors will continue to face astronomical, unaffordable costs for lifesaving cancer treatments."
The senators noted the cruel irony of this gift to the pharmaceutical industry was that Republicans offset its cost by slashing roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade, a move that's projected to strip health insurance from millions of Americans.
"Republicans were able to find billions of dollars to bailout the pharmaceutical industry in their multitrillion tax bill, but you claimed that fiscal austerity required you to enact the largest healthcare cuts in history, terminating coverage for more than 15 million Americans and hiking healthcare costs for everyone, even imposing a 'sick tax' on the lowest income Americans," the senators argued. "Republicans' budget bill benefited the ultrawealthy and big corporations, like Big Pharma, with tax cuts and bailouts at the expense of working and middle-class Americans' healthcare."
The senators also slammed Trump's decision to eschew Medicare price negotiations of the kind first employed by former U.S. President Joe Biden's administration after the passage of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that authorized such negotiations for a limited set of drugs for the first time. Instead, they pointed out that Trump has demanded pharmaceutical companies cut prices on Americans by raising them everywhere else in the world, which they described as a "flashy, empty announcement."
Steve Knievel, access to medicines advocate at Public Citizen, similarly dismissed Trump's recent letters to pharmaceutical companies last week as a completely ineffective approach to lowering prescription drug costs.
"If President Trump was serious about lowering drug prices for Americans, instead of promising to help drug corporations profiteer in other countries, he would work with Congress to pass legislation to lower prices here so Big Pharma can no longer charge U.S. patients and taxpayers the highest prices in the world," he said.
Trump in recent days has been making a number of mathematically impossible promises to lower the cost of drugs for Americans by as much as "1,200%," which would mean that pharmaceutical companies would be paying Americans substantial sums of money in exchange for taking their drugs.
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